Can artificial intelligence take over the world?
The world seems to be operating under the "law of maximum intelligence" (I made this up), which is that the species with the most intelligence get to realise its preferences the most strongly. Put another way, the more intelligent you are, the more the world takes the shape of what you want; and this happens through your actions upon the world.

This is tautological if what you mean by "intelligence" is "ability to act well".

For example, both humans and chimps want to be happy, but you get zoos and not chimps paradise, because zoos are optimised to please humans, not chimps.

If you grant this law, then all you need is a "greater than humanity" level of intelligence, and an entity with that level of intelligence should have its preferences met.

As to whever or not this will happen, I’ll quote Sam Harris in this little talk:


  All you have to grant to get your fears [about AI] up and running is
  that:
  
  
  We will continue to make progress in hardware and software design
  (unless we destroy ourselves some other way), and 
  There’s nothing
  magical about the wetware we have running inside our heads, and that
  an intelligent machine could be build of other material. […]
  
  
  Once you’ve granted those two propositions, you’ll now be hard pressed
  to find some hand hold with which to resist yor slide into real
  concern about where this is all going.


To go back to the question: yes if you have an entity/agent that is sufficiently intelligent, and with a goal that would directly or as a side-effect cause it to take over the world.
Note that this is a real concern because of instrumental convergence. Good talk on this topic by Nates Soares.

I also recommend the lesswrong forums: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/AI_takeoff and Nick Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html (or his book also titled Superintelligence)